The model necessitates that they restrict your access in crummy ways or they wouldn't be solvant. I met my partner on Hinge but I was paying to be able to reach people. Glad to be done with those apps.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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I hate to be a downer, but...
Building,, running and maintaining a website isn't free. Building, running and maintaining a popular website is fucking expensive. Somebody's got to pay those bills.
As the saying goes, if it's free, you're not the customer, you're the product. Corollary, if it's not free, you still might be the product.
Furthermore, these days I would assume that 99.9% of profiles on a "free" dating site are scammers, or bots, or scammer bots, many of which are probably run by the people running the website.
And to double down on the downerism, subscription based dating sites/apps are financially motivated to keep you paying for as long as possible. They are not motivated to help you find a match, cancel your subscription, and live happily ever after.
In an attempt to not be a total downer jerk, my suggestion would be to find local meetup groups that interest you (even if just barely) and start going to those consistently.
That's how I met my spouse almost 14 years ago. We were both on the dating apps but not finding each other. Eventually we met through a meetup group that I ran, and after months of casually chatting occasionally at group meetings, sparks spontaneously started flying. π€·
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Honestly, apps (web included) in 2025 are just profit farming. It will be hard to get anything substantial from the experience.
Best suggestion is avoid OLD and just meet people in person. Get a hobby and attend things and eventually you will find like minded people.
Things like rock climbing, board games, cycling, etc. Hobbies that have places you go to and do a thing.
Sorry I donβt have any better suggestions π€·ββοΈ
I believe most apps can be used for free... to an extent. Just like mobile games they can very much be pay to win with many QoL features locked behind a subscription. I know you prefer web, so I'm mostly thinking of apps that also have a web interface. I'm also a woman and a similar age as you; I've given up on dating sites and apps to meet people. I do have friends that have had decent success with Bumble, Hinge (no web interface), and Boo. I've not looked into the full web-based ones in a long time, but even then I remember them being very limited without a subscription; I can't imagine that's changed. Best of luck girl π©· Online dating is a complete drain!
It's called outside!
Joking aside, its fundamentally unlikely as if you're not paying you're the product and maintaining a dating network is a lot of work both in admin tasks, technical tasks and legal tasks.
A friend of mine met her now husband and father of her child on the free tier of Plenty Of Fish. That was a decade ago though. I'm not sure if the service has degraded since.
What differentiates a dating site from something like Lemmy? The secret matching algorithm?
You could definitely use lemmy for dating if you wanted to. But dating apps offer eg. geographic filtering and (at least should!) do a much better job of guiding users to make meaningful profiles. Lemmy has no need for such.
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